The author writes well. A good mix of personal history, Cervantes, and travel in Spain. About half way through I began to think that I liked the book but not the author as she sounded a bit superior - but she won me over. And I really wonder now whether I have ever read Don Quixote If I did it was a long time ago and this has made me interested. ( )

The author writes well. A good mix of personal history, Cervantes, and travel in Spain. About half way through I began to think that I liked the book but not the author as she sounded a bit superior - but she won me over. And I really wonder now whether I have ever read Don Quixote If I did it was a long time ago and this has made me interested. ( )

Very few travel books, or tales of life in other cultures, can sustain themselves or the reader's interest based solely on the authors observations and reflections. To my mind - at least - a memorable book about 'foreign parts' is a story about a journey to (or from) something, be it a place or a thing or a hope or a memory, and the reader participates with both the author's outer and inner journeys. Twin journeys of the road, and of the soul, as it were.

So Miranda France's story of Spain and Don Quixote has the essential elements. She unfolds the story of Don Quixote as she unfolds the story of post Franco Spain, and that of her uncertain connection with a young man as committed to revolution as he is to avoiding a committed relationship.

The scholarship on Don Quixote and Cervantes is there, and told with enough enthusiasm as to tempt the reader to take up - or take up again - that golden brick of a book (though I'd still stick with the translator Cohen's advice to exercise 'judicious skipping'). As for Spain itself, this is as good an account as you'll find anywhere of the the explosion of political - and sexual - expression that followed the decades of Franco's total repression of what we'd called liberal society, and to some extent of the massive hangover that followed. And as for the author's journey of the heart? Well there's a lot left unsaid, but there's enough left in the text to allow the reader to suppose that this was not the end, but the beginning of something much, much better.

Highly recommended, if you have an interest in Don Quixote or Spain, or have some sympathy with a tale of being in love in foreign parts with a very difficult object of affection. ( )